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Kroozbox - PVD to media theatre solution
rick.ca:
--- Quote ---Don't forget that this is for TV viewing. At one point it becomes too much for a TV+ remote control interface.
--- End quote ---
Yes, as one who has tried to program everything into my remote control, I understand very well. :-[ It's a very challenging design issue. It's always nice to be able to do more with a remote, but if the result is just a little less simple or intuitive, the overall result is usually negative. What you need is selection scheme (i.e., method of zeroing-in on a movie) that is quick and intuitive, and works for most collections. To illustrate the problem, consider what you have now—selection by first letter of title or by genre. In the unlikely event I remember the title, I'm still going to be unhappy about having to scroll to first letter to find it. If I select the genre, I still may have 10 pages to wade through. For me, filtering out seen movies reduces the numbers to a manageable size, but others have much larger collections.
This make break the simplicity rule, or be a nightmare to implement, but here's a thought: Provide a set of useful selection criteria, for example: title, genre, viewed, year, rating, director, movie/series. They might be presented as icons across the top of the screen. For each one, when selected, present a manageable secondary selection that will fit on screen (e.g., titles: abc, def...; viewed: unseen, seen, all; year: decades; etc). Allow them to be applied in any order, each applied to the results of the previous. If that's not complicated enough, make sure one can "back up"—that is, undo the last filter without having to start all over again.
rick.ca:
--- Quote ---I updated the templates with "visibility" check and added the "unseen" selection.
--- End quote ---
Much better, thanks, but there's still a problem... The movie count after selecting All - Newest - A - B - C is still includes the invisible movies, and the navigation arrows attempt to use that—producing blank pages. Unseen works fine.
More on filtering... This is obvious, but it just noticed now—wish list movies are included, but are not distinguished from other movies. I suppose the best way to deal with that is to provide a configuration parameter to include/exclude them.
Nono:
--- Quote ---The movie count after selecting All - Newest - A - B - C is still includes the invisible movies
--- End quote ---
Oops.. didn't test very well - I don't have any invisible movie. Try this and let me know:
http://rapidshare.com/files/152800975/PVDTemplate2.zip
--- Quote ---This make break the simplicity rule, or be a nightmare to implement, but here's a thought: Provide a set of useful selection criteria, for example: title, genre, viewed, year, rating, director, movie/series. They might be presented as icons across the top of the screen. For each one, when selected, present a manageable secondary selection that will fit on screen (e.g., titles: abc, def...; viewed: unseen, seen, all; year: decades; etc). Allow them to be applied in any order, each applied to the results of the previous. If that's not complicated enough, make sure one can "back up"—that is, undo the last filter without having to start all over again.
--- End quote ---
A few checkbox accross the top ("seen", "whish", "sort by rate", "by director", "by actor"..) along with a generic search box.. ok.. I'll think about it.
rick.ca:
--- Quote ---Try this and let me know
--- End quote ---
The invisible movie problem seems to be resolved.
I thought I had found another problem where a handful of movies were appearing without a title. After struggling to see a pattern, I finally realized Kroozbox was displaying the original title, and these were the movies in my database that happened to have no original title. [Not the easiest thing to spot, since PVD only displays the original title if it exists and is different than the title.] From the templates, it looks like both titles are being retrieved, but I didn't attempt to figure out if some logic was being used to decide which title to display. From my data, it seems that only the original title is used. Since an original title doesn't have to exist in PVD, I would have thought Kroozbox would use the title, and perhaps instead the original title, if it exists.
Nono:
--- Quote ---From my data, it seems that only the original title is used. Since an original title doesn't have to exist in PVD, I would have thought Kroozbox would use the title, and perhaps instead the original title, if it exists.
--- End quote ---
Yes... the template display the "original title" (the "name" is use as a title tag in the link but that's about it).
You could always change the <!--ORIGTITLEDB-S--> tag to <!--TITLEDB-S--> in the HTML body of all the (A,C,D,E,U)-4.html and (A,C,D,E,U)-6.html files. But I'll make an update to the template to include a search box so I'll change that also.
I'll let you know.
Cheers.
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